2 Clarifications on Laud Humphreys

As I posted a few days back, the stories about Larry Craig have revived interest in Laud Humphreys' controversial book, The Tea Room Trade.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Education (and Crooked Timber) offered a detailed book review of a recent Humphreys biography. Based on this review, I grabbed our library's copy of the book and read it Friday morning (minus the appendices, the book is about 100 pages). Two things presented in the biography struck me was being worth comment:

1. Alvin Gouldner assaulted Humphreys in retaliation for posting an unflattering posters portraying the professor as a bird that "feeds on underdogs." Humphreys told a New York Times reporter that he thought Gouldner's 1968 article in the American Sociologist, "was an unfair personal attack on leading exponents of what some term 'underdog sociology,' and an oblique attack on certain members of the sociology department at Washington University." Later in the Times piece we read, "Professor Gouldner, who called Mr. Humphreys a 'peeping parson,' contends that the altercation had been precipitated by the former clergyman's anger at his article."
   
   Ah, Sociology... You can't make this stuff up. But this confirms that I was wrong before; the stories of Gouldner beating up Humprheys for his "unethical research practices" do not hold water.
   
   
2. More interestingly, the biographers went to Humphreys's tearoom and examined the physical space. They conclude there is no way that he could have ascertained the detail of these encounters reported in his book as a non-participant observer. That is, he could not have observed the nuanced details of this ritual as a watch queen. This leads the biographers to conclude that he was engaged in as a participating observer.
   
   The biographers address the ethical implications of this, specifically that when Humphreys appeared to do his "survey", it's entirely possible that the subjects recognized him and felt compelled to answer his questions in fear of being outed. But there are some substantive implications as well. If he was an active participant in the tea-room trades, his work could be understood as normalizing advocacy. That is, an effort to communicate to heterosexuals that they should not fear this activity; that *we* have come up with ways to protect your innocence. Perhaps this is more wishful rhetoric than scientific reporting?

I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it's an interesting question to follow. I know that advocacy research or participatory action research is popular within some areas of the field, but I have my reservations about it. I'll leave it at that for now. The only other impression I took away from the book was that Humphreys did not seem to be a terribly pleasant human being, at least to those he disagreed with.